Reading The Trail: Exploring The Literature And Natural History Of The California Crest

4. Protecting Arid Lands with Austin's Aesthetics

C H A P T E R F O U R Protecting Arid Lands with Austin’s Aesthetics The earth is no wanton to give up all her best to every comer, but keeps a sweet, separate intimacy for each. M A RY AU S T I N , The Land of Little Rain As the dusky shadows of night rise out of canyons and creep out of caves, we climb a steep butte, moving between two cliff arms toward the darkening night sky. My students and I are deep in the heart of Austin’s land of little rain, a country of lost borders and blurred boundaries. We have been exploring dry desert washes, wind-carved canyons, and cave-ridden cliffs all day. The land is so pocked and punctured, so brightly bathed in sunlight and shadow, that we feel as if we have been witnessing a sermon in form and color, a song in shape and stone. But now darkness is climbing like a tide out of the narrow canyons, and the stars are just starting to appear as tiny pinholes in the falling curtain of night. As we move through the sage and mesquite, an erratic fluttering of small black shapes stops us in our tracks. “Bats,” I whisper, as the blurring black shapes whiz by our heads and wheel up into the star-studded sky. We stand watching, still as stones, mesmerized by their movement. They flutter about from one cliff face to another, disappearing for a moment in shadow and then pausing for an instant, bat-shaped against the last faint glowing of the sky. We cannot move, we are so filled with wonder. At times they swoop in ............................................................................................... close, with a whirring of wings and a breath of wind. Smiles erupt on our faces; our eyes sparkle and flash in the night. In the exchange of shared glances, eyes and hearts say what words could never express:“This moment, this thing we are doing, this memory we will share, is somehow more valuable to me than I can even express or understand.” It is curious, I think, that the flight and feeding of bats have done this to us. These are supposed to be dangerous, ugly, rabies-infested harbingers of evil, yet tonight they fill us with nothing but awe and wonder. The graceful dance of their intricate and swarming flight plays out a silent symphony over our heads. A thousand near misses and abruptly avoided head-on collisions become, as we watch, a graceful dance of skill and sophistication, the purposeful pursuit of insect prey. When our stunned and reverent silence finally passes, we begin to talk about the experience. How strange, we observe, that one of the most beautiful things any of us has ever seen was this flight of thousands of bats, creatures most people consider ugly, dirty, and dangerous. It is also interesting, we note, that it occurred here, in the middle of a high-elevation desert, a landscape most people see as inhospitable and barren. Although the deserts and mountains of southern California held a powerful and unique beauty for Austin, she recognized that this view was not commonly held by her readers and those who had recently emigrated to the arid Southwest. Throughout her work, Austin attempts to alter these preconceived notions of beauty by moving from the traditional, culturally received aesthetic tastes of her readers to her own highly developed environmental aesthetics. She also encourages readers to experience the desert directly in order to come to an appreciation of its unique beauty, and she utilizes both scientific information and imaginative speculation to inform and shape readers’ aesthetic tastes. Austin recognized that one of the reasons for our failure to appreciate the beauty of desert lands is that they do not conform to our traditional notions of the beautiful and the good. Because the desert does not readily support human life, it is often associated with death, ugliness, and waste. Austin confronts our traditional associations of the “useful” with the “good” and the “good” with the“beautiful” in order to develop an alternative paradigm that is capable of seeing the desert’s value in nonutilitarian ways. She writes, “Desert is a loose term to indicate land that supports no man; whether the 70 : Reading the Trail — land can be bitted [sic] and broken to that purpose is not proven.Void of life it never is, however...